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Thursday, January 17, 2013

Preschool K3 - Unit 9

I know I say this every time, but I'm soooo far behind in my school posts for Mackenzie. I actually thought we were only doing Unit 11 right now, but tomorrow we actually finish unit 12, so this time I really am soooooo behind!

With that said, here's unit 9 from BEFORE Christmas!

Bible:
Our story for this unit was Moses and the 10 plagues of Egypt. This was originally going to be just one lesson in unit 8, but it's such a big story, that I decided it needed to be it's own unit. I'm glad we did it over the course of the week because we had so much fun stretching the story and activities out. First we acted out the story using printable from 1+1+1=1. Mackenzie was the Pharoah, hence her mean face when saying "no!"

Throughout the week we made puppets for each plague...(1)water turned to blood, (2) frogs, (3) lice, (4) flies, (5) death of livestock, (6) boils, (7) hail, (8) locusts, (9) darkness, (10) death of first born.

After the puppets were all finished, we reenacted the story again. This time, Meredith was Moses! ;)

Letter:
Our letter this week was "P". As in plagues...and also pigs and penguins from Carissa's Animal ABC's.

We are still going through our alphabet book and when I turned to the P pages Mackenzie said, "I don't feel like coloring the pineapple."

I was so impressed that she recognized the the object, I almost didn't make her color it. Almost. ;) I asked her what two colors she needed and she said green and yellow. Then I helped her color it.
Mackenzie also worked on her handwriting for the letter P.

Sight Words:
I decided to adopt a more formal curriculum to teach sight words for Mackenzie. Rather than just picking my own, I opted to use Carissa's You Can Read curriculum. (clearly I love 1+1+1=1) There are so many great activities to learn each unit's sight words. Each unit has four words and we are going to spend two weeks on each unit. Unit one's words were "a", "the", "see", "and". She learned all of these words last year, so it was a little bit of a review, but the printables also focus on writing and spelling the words.
Tracing lines...

Connecting the dots to make shapes...

Puzzles to learn how to spell...

The sheet below is one of my favorites. She has to circle a specific word in a specific color and all of the words are in different fonts. I think she tries to glance at the page and see if she can see the word. When she can't see it right away she gets a little frustrated, so I had to teach her how to start at the top and look at each word to see if it matches what she's looking for. Slow and steady...

She enjoyed her first word search, too!

And finally, we worked on writing the words.

She even practiced writing them on her own...

Like I said earlier, we will spread these units over 2 weeks, so I'll have the wrap up for these words in unit 10's post. Whenever that actually happens! Ha! ;)

Theme Unit:
Since Christmas was approaching when we completed this unit, we also worked on a reindeer theme pack of printables. The packs came from 3Dinosaurs and Royal Baloo. The packs are full of "what is different", counting sheets, finding the patterns, size sorting and so much more that we just couldn't fit into our week!

I thought it was funny that she glued the reindeer laying down! I tried to move the first one and she got upset with me, so I left it at that. I guess they were all resting before the big night! ;)

Royal Baloo's pack also included this sheet on different ways of seeing the number nine. I think I need to make more of these kinds of things with our numbers.

Miscellaneous:
And last, but not least, the little miscellaneous things we did.
Mystery Alphabet...

For the activity below, I went with whatever she wanted to do. She insisted on going through everything on this board I bought for use when I was still working. She said all the numbers, letters, shapes and colors. It was a nice break in the lessons and yet she was still learning AND having fun! YAY!

OK, so my last picture is also a confession. I've seen these kinds of sheets several times in different printable packs and never understood what to do with them. If you can't see below, the are the same shape/symbol repeated over and over and beside each row are the numbers 1-6. For whatever reason, I just didn't know what to do with them until finally it clicked. When it says "color in the pattern", it means to make a pattern based on the number beside the row. Or at least that's what I assume it means. For example, she colored row one using ONE color. Row two we alternated between TWO colors, three used THREE colors and so forth.

Mackenzie loved picking out the colors for us to use and we took turns coloring with our assigned crayons. Great idea and I'm glad I finally understand what to do! By the way, these shape pattern sheets are from 3 Dinosaurs.

Unit 9 down! For Unit 10 we are still talking about Moses! As I told Mackenzie, he was an important character and great man of God, so we should spend a little longer on his story. ;)